[Info-vax] Assembly languages, was: Re: OT: PDP-11 history in arstechnica

[John Reagan]

On Wednesday, March 16, 2022 at 8:48:43 PM UTC-4, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2022-03-16, Rich Alderson <ne... at alderson.users.panix.com> wrote: 
> > 
> > ALL the PDP-10 mnemonics for instructions which access memory have the same 
> > form (taking MOVE as a canonical example): 
> > 
> > MOVE load accumulator with contents of memory at effective address 
> > MOVEI load accumulator with immediate effective address calculation 
> > MOVES load accumulator with swapped halfwords of contents of memory 
> > at effective address 
> > MOVEM store accumulator into memory at effective address 
> > 
> > Look at the last character of the instruction. You don't even have to remember 
> > the difference between "load" and "store". 
> >
> Doesn't anyone else find it strange that the mnemonic across all 
> architectures is some variant of MOVE or MOV instead of COPY or CPY ? 
> 

Alpha has neither.  The assembler has a pseudo-op named MOV but that is just a
OR with R0